Voicemail is a centralized system of managing telephone messages and conveying voice messages. Voicemail has become a ubiquitous feature on phone systems serving companies, cellular and residential subscribers. Cellular and residential voicemail systems are used primarily as simple telephone answering systems.
The next development in messaging has been making text messaging real-time, rather than asynchronous store-and-forward delivery into a mailbox. Text messaging requires being able to detect device connectivity to the Internet and contact recipient “availability” status to exchange real-time messages, as well as, personalized directories that allow a predetermined group of people to find out a user's status and initiate a real-time text messaging exchange. Instant Messaging has since evolved into more than short text messages, but now can include the exchange of data files, such as documents, pictures, etc., and the escalation of the contact into a voice conversational connection.
The increase in wireless mobility, originally through cellular services and today through IP-based Wi-Fi, was also a driver for messaging convergence with mobile telephony. These capabilities not only foster the use of speech user interfaces for message management, but increase the demand for retrieval of voice messages integrated with email. In addition, users may reply to both voice and email messages in voice rather than text. New services are beginning to blur the boundaries between voicemail and text by delivering voicemails to mobile phones as SMS text messages.
Visual Voicemail involves the addition of a visual aspect to phone voicemail to allow users to view a list of audio voicemail entries or even read transcriptions of voicemail. Systems have been developed for providing a transcript of a received voicemail message to a user to allow the user to read a text version of the received voicemail message. However, such systems require a data service on the user's mobile device, and thus, preclude the functionality from users who do not subscribe to data plans. In addition, provisioning visual voicemail as a data service creates complexity and requires determining how to handle situations wherein the customer is not in a data coverage area. This includes determining how to handle synchronization between the handset and the voicemail system as it moves in and out of data coverage, and also how service providers deal with their roaming partners. For example, a data roaming agreement may not be in place with all providers. Furthermore, a significant portion of subscribers may use first generation mobile handsets that have poor data throughput connections. Thus, when first generation mobile handsets are in data coverage, the upload of the data for the handset is slow thereby making the service a bad experience for the user. Another problem involves having two data stores for voicemail messages. If a customer plays a message and then deletes it, a synchronization routine has to be performed that requires the third party vendor to provide a notification to the voicemail system side to also delete that same message.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.